A STORY OF O

I went for a walk, to the end of Southend pier.  It’s one and a third miles apparently, and they count you in, just so you know where you are.  

And, OK I admit it, I caught the train back, and this is almost an interesting pedestrian dilemma.  Walk there and take the train back? Or train there and walk back? Actually much depends on whether there’s a train about to depart when you arrive at the land end of the pier.  On my day there wasn’t.

And I realized I’ve walked along Southend pier quite a few times over the years, not often but regularly enough, with a good few years between each visit.  

In fact when I did it for the first time, when I was wasting a year of my life doing an MA in European Drama at Essex University, the train wasn’t running in either direction.   So I walked there and back, and somehow I survived. 

This is me on that previous occasion:

And these were my walking companions:

         Even walking there and back – two and two thirds miles isn’t really much of a hike but who doesn’t like a train journey, especially in a train that’s named John Betjeman, the man who said "The Pier is Southend, Southend is the Pier,"  though I think many would argue that Southend is more than just the pier.

The current pier has a few attractions – kiddies rides (as they’re called):

and a fancy architectural ‘royal pavilion.’  I had an Americano and a flapjack – no sign of any royals.  

But perhaps the greatest attraction for walkers is that you can get a certificate saying that you’ve walked the length of the pier.  To be honest, I think it would be perfectly possible to get the certificate without having done the walk at all, but what kind of cad would do that?

I paid my quid for a handwritten certificate. They ask you to write your name on a piece of paper before they make out the certificate, no doubt to avoid spelling mistakes.  But evidently it’s not a foolproof method.  I am now Geoff Nichlson missing an ‘o.’ But you know, somehow I like it better this way.

CAGE WALKING (YOU KNOW, AS OPPOSED TO CAGE FIGHTING)

And another thing I did on my ‘holidays’ – I walked over to John Cage’s childhood home in Moss Avenue, Eagle Rock, in northwest LA.  This may be Cage junior in the garden at that house, but don’t put money on it (I mean it's definitely John Cage, but it may not be the Eagle Rock house.

Cage’s dad, also named John Cage, built the house from scratch, which may seem surprising at first, but given that he was an inventor and built his own submarine, less so.  A guy who can build his own submarine can probably build his own house. 

I went with my psychogeographic pal Anthony Miller – that’s him about to trespass and transgress, while also showing his bald spot.  

There was nobody home as far as we could tell, despite multiple cars in the driveway including this white, left hand drive Morris Minor.  How many of those were sold in America?  That's not an entirely rhetorical question.

Then we pottered around the neighbourhood, saw euphorbias springing up adjacent to the sidewalk, 

a wayside mini-library,

some very trim trees,

and some stuffed monkeys tied to other trees:

Later, rereading Cage’s Indeterminacy, which strikes me as one of the truly great twentieth century texts, I rediscovered a couple of pieces that involve walking; this one:

That’s a bit rough, even for my robust sensibilities, but this one, I really, really like:

Actually the idea that John Cage might be walking along Hollywood Boulevard, or anywhere else, with 'nothing much to do' is the real surprise.

HOUSEHOLD WALKING

Yes, I walked when I was in Los Angeles last month, of course I did.  It’s what I do wherever I am.  And despite urban myths to the contrary I saw plenty of other people walking too.  Like these good folks on Hollywood Boulevard:

And I went to Palm Springs and saw people walking there too.

And also in Yucca Valley.

And right at the very end, on my last day, I was walking in Little Tokyo in LA, and I wasn’t trying to have one of those ‘perfect moments’ to round off the trip, and I hadn’t even been thinking much about obelisks, I certainly hadn’t seen any on my trip, but then I hadn’t really expected to, and yet and yet .. there I was on East Second Street and suddenly this mighty metal obelisk loomed out at me.

My first thought was that it could be a decorative element for the nearby Japanese restaurant but it seemed a bit grand for that.  A basic online search didn’t bring up anything and I told myself that was OK.  Sometimes it’s good for a walk and an obelisk to retain a certain mystery.

         But back home further searching revealed that it’s a work of art (as to some degree are all obelisks, I suppose) but this one is called Sliver Tower and it’s by the artisy Peter Lodato, from his "Wrathful Means" series which apparently “depicts the power and ferocity of Mahakala, the protector of Lamism,” though I don’t see how you’d know that from looking at the obelisk

But … and hold onto your hat kids, you know what’s on the wall of my living room, a thing that I bought on a whim in all ignorance from the local junk/antique shop – yep it’s a mask of Mahakala.  

Spooky?  Nah, just the kind of stuff that happens all the time.  In Japan, I understand, Mahakala is a protective household god.  I can really use one of those.

TOO MUCH TIME, WITH AND WITHOUT THE CAPTAIN

Suffering from insomnia, and not wanting to become entirely Ambien-dependent, I found myself between 3 and 5 am the other morning reading Mike Barnes’s biography Captain Beefheart.  It did not put me to sleep.

Now, as we know, tales of Don Van Vliet as a desert rat are often exaggerated, but in the book I found references to a promotional interview Beefheart did with one Meatball Fulton in which Beefheart takes about being a ‘trangent’ (his own invented word as far as I can tell), about bunking off school and going out walking in the desert with the trangents outside Lancaster in the Mojave desert.  He explains, ‘Well, what’s a “trangent,” do you know what I mean?  Someone who likes to go for a walk farther than somebody who is a resident.’

Well, I’m certainly no resident of the Mojave desert but I do go there once in a while, and the week before last I was walking there, not really all that far, in the scrubby parts outside Yucca Valley, and not in the company of anyone else, trangent or not, but I definitely walked farther than some, in the sense that I didn’t see anybody else while I was walking.

In some ways, you don’t have to go all that far to find a “Clear Spot” in the desert but I suppose it all depends on your definition of clear, and in any case that wonderful Beefheart song with its mentions of “Sleepin' in a bayou on a old rotten cot” obviously isn’t referring to the desert at all.  Still, for some of us, when we walk in the desert, the Captain is always with us in spirit.

The notion of the pristine or virgin or clear desert is always problematic.  Much of the American desert is under the protection of the Bureau of Land Management or part of a National Park, which is a fine thing, but there’s nothing strictly natural about that.  Otherwise much of the desert belongs to private individuals who may not do anything with it, but that doesn’t keep it looking pristine or even good, let alone clear.

Obviously houses get built in the desert, more and more of them, and sometimes houses get burned to the ground.

And there’s a whole category of people who think of the desert as a non-place (and we don’t need to get all French and philosophical about this, though we certainly could), or perhaps they think of it as a place that doesn’t matter, as a place where you can shoot your guns and dump your furniture.  Like this:

Clarity comes in many different forms. Here are some people who, one way or another, have found their own clear spots.